At the gleaming new Fruitport High School in Michigan, the entrance opens to a spacious atrium, with floating rows of lockers arrayed diagonally from the front door. They are noticeably short so students can peer over them. Overlooking the atrium is a walkway fenced with metal sheets and pockmarked with slits through which you can survey the space below if you were to crouch. Hallways bear “wing walls . . . to provide barriers for school children to hide behind.” Classrooms, meanwhile, each have a single window at the door and are designed so that exactly thirty-two students plus a teacher can be concealed from view if they huddle in the corner.

This is school design for the depressing reality of twenty-first-century America, where gun violence has become the leading cause of death for youths, and the number of mass shootings continues to soar — to more than one a day in 2023 so far. Among the most horrifying massacres are those at schools.

Reasonable societies would respond to these trends by curtailing access to guns and making it harder to carry them in public. We have decided instead to make it easier to access and carry guns — and use them — in public and to transform our schools into fortresses, traumatizing an entire generation in the process.